The Fat Chick Diaries

One of the truly beautiful things about my life is that my commute home from work takes me right under Times Square. On any given evening, if I want to I can rise up out of the ground, walk half a block, and partake of a smorgasbord of first-run movies ranging from summer blockbusters to a surprising range of indie films.

Take tonight for example. Earlier today, it suddenly occurred to me why I can’t stop watching the new Star Trek film. It’s this: Eric Bana is the most delicious space villain ever. The moment when he makes contact with the Enterprise and says, “Hello Christopher, I’m Nero,” is worth the entire price of admission right there. So tonight, I stopped by the AMC Empire 25 and caught the 6:30 show.

Afterward, as I walked through the Times Square subway station to hop the 7 back to Queens, I passed by a advertisement on the wall that featured a group of gorgeous, happy, energetic, well-dressed fat people.

Wait. WHAT?

This demanded a closer inspection. Sometimes you see fat people in ads, but they’re NEVER gorgeous, happy, energetic, and well-dressed. And if they are, they’re certainly not in groups. Something must be amiss.

Turns out, there’s a new reality show premiering June 29 on Oxygen. It’s called Dance Your Ass Off. Okay, so it’s a weight loss show. It starts with the premise that fat is a problem to be remedied. It’s not, strictly speaking, about fat acceptance. But damn, those fatties looked GOOD! The women had their hair done, their makeup on, and they were dressed to the nines in cute shoes and dresses that shimmered. The guys were handsome and neat and clean and looked like somebody I’d really like to date. And every single one of them had a look in their eye like, “Sit back and watch, skinny couch potatoes, while my voluptuous self dances circles around you.”

I do not trust American television to do right by fat folks. Especially not if it’s reality TV. I mean, look at what we have so far: The Biggest Loser, which claims to be about transforming lives, but is really about showing us images of sweaty, panting fat folks on treadmills, who will later be dressed in spandex bike shorts and sports bras and placed on a scale, as if showing their fat rolls to all of America is a necessary aspect of transforming their lives. No thanks. And then there’s I Want To Save Your Life, where a shameless self-promoter with questionable credentials stalks fat people and jumps on them for every bad habit he can find, all in the name of wanting to save them from themselves. Oh, and cashing a big fat paycheck while he’s at it. And then there’s the show where they make over fat people so they can go out on dates– the unspoken assumption being that fat people are undatable without massive strategic interventions from dating experts, fashion consultants, and hair-and-makeup people. No thanks.

So when I got home tonight, I watched the trailer. Setting aside for a moment the fact that, as I said, the show is mostly about weight loss, overall I really liked what I saw. It appears that the fat contestants are provided with personal trainers and dance coaches so they can learn to dance beautifully and vigorously. They are provided with dance costumes that are sexy but not exploitative, and judges who appear to be able to focus on the dancing and not on the fat. As much as a show based on weight loss can, this show appears to treat fat people with dignity and respect and a reasonable and like capable people. I plan to watch it.

Oh yeah, and here’s today’s famous person sighting: Ali Velshi was standing outside the Time Warner building tonight when I walked past it. I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen everybody from CNN except my girl Candy Crowley!

Over on the New York Times Well blog, Tara Parker Pope writes today about “the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods.” They put people into groups and assignged each group a particular type of reduced-calorie diet: some cut down on carbs, some cut down on fat, and some cut down on animal protein. Here’s what happened:

After two years, every diet group had lost — and regained — about the same amount of weight regardless of what diet had been assigned. Participants lost an average of 13 pounds at six months and had maintained about 9 pounds of weight loss and a two-inch drop in waist size after two years.

This is somewhat ambiguous language, but the bottom line appears to be this: after all that effort, two years later people were down an average of only nine pounds. NINE POUNDS. Since the participants were considered overweight to begin with, one can assume that the pointy finger of society felt they had more than nine pounds to lose. Oh well.

My own conclusion for this study is that it proves that substantial weight loss is damn near impossible regardless of what you try. The conclusion drawn by the researchers is that it doesn’t matter what kind of calories you’re counting, as long as you’re counting calories. Cutting fat works about as well as cutting protein– the point is to be cutting something. Thank goodness for small favors. But to me, cutting 750 calories out of your diet every day only to have lost a mere 9 pounds two years down the road hardly seems worth the sacrifice. Beneath the post, one of the commenters, JenK, puts it like this:

Well, there’s also a question of whether an average net loss of 9lbs is worth that much effort.

Starting a regular exercise program is probably just as good for your health in the long run, and will probably feel better, than jumping through the food hoops.

So I wonder… what do we do with this information? Do we really want to live in a society where we all obsessively count calories? I will admit to keeping an electronic food log. I do it mostly to keep myself honest and nutritionally balanced, but it also counts calories automatically, and I will admit that I do find myself looking at that number a lot to see what I can learn from it, if anything. But do I really want to do that for the rest of my life? Does anybody? Should anybody?

Wow. That’s pretty bleak. They

What’s up with women having a harder time with weight than men? I know a hell of a lot of women, including myself, who have watched in frustration as their male partners drop weight almost effortlessly while we experience failure after failure after failure. Back when I was married, my husband and I tried to lose some weight together. We ate our meals together and exercized together. He lost weight. I did not. It wasn’t until a few years later when I knocked myself out with constant jogging of 3-5 miles every day that I finally lost a bunch of weight, all of which I regained within a year of my divorce, with extra to spare. What’s up with that?

According to this article from today’s Washington Post, brain scans show that when confronted with their favorite foods, the brains of women and men react very differently.

Here’s a quote from the article:

In the study, participants were quizzed about their favorite foods, which ranged from pizza to cinnamon buns and burgers to chocolate cake, and then were asked to fast overnight.

The next day they underwent brain scans while being presented with their favorite foods. In addition, they used a technique called cognitive inhibition, which they had been taught, to suppress thoughts of hunger and eating.

While both men and women said the inhibition technique decreased their hunger, the brain scans showed that men’s brain activity actually decreased, while the part of women’s brains that responds to food remained active.

Surprised, ladies? I’m sure not.

Like many of my sister fat chick bloggers, I have blogged about Governor Paterson’s fat tax. You can see my previous posts here and here. My beef has been not so much with the idea as with the abusive and misleading name given to the tax, especially since the majority of the fat people I know already drink diet soda.

I’m pretty new to this whole blogging thing, and I’m still in the process of exploring the amazing blogs out there that deal with fat issues. So forgive me if I’m the last kid on the block to clue in to this amazing resource: Junkfood Science. The blogger, Sandra Szwarc, is a thoroughly credentialed nurse among other things, and she knows how to bring the data. one of her favorite sports is taking down idiots who use outdated, debunked studies or unsupported myths to promote bogus ideas about diet and nutrition, and therefore often about fatness and health. She’s a mythbuster extraordinaire, and I can’t stop reading her stuff.

Here’s her take on the obesity tax, which she calls a fat discrimination tax. When I wrote about the tax myself, I said I didn’t think it was the fat people who were drinking the sugared sodas. She actually brings the data: the research shows not only that it’s not fat people, but rather young adult males, who drink the majority of sugared sodas. She also busts the governor’s people for using the now thoroughly debunked claim that obesity causes more than 300,000 deaths a year.

If you haven’t already, go take a look. It’s definitely worth your time.

This recent article from the NY Times on fat acceptance and the HAES movement just makes me want to stand up and cheer. Read and enjoy!

From the “weird things that make you fatter” category: The New York Times did a story on a small study that showed that people eat more after mentally taxing activities. Thinking hard raises stress hormones, which in turn lead to eating more. Excellent! My mission is clear: stop thinking and lose weight! Um, no thanks. If I did that, I might be thinner, but I might also accidentally vote Republican. Eeeeew.

One of the things that keeps me off the “if you only did X, Y, and Z you would be thin” finger-pointing bandwagon is the fact that I know in my heart that weight management is not a level playing field. We’re not all fighting the same battle. The reason I know this is that I am basically a walking, talking controlled experiment when it comes to the genetic contribution toward body size. I’ll post about that at some point, but not today.

I’m not saying we’re not all responsible for ourselves. We are. But I don’t find it productive at all for the skinny world to pretend as if there are not multiple variables involved, some within our control and some not so much.

Four of the weirdest are ear infections, gut bugs, MSG, and baby formula.

One thing that doesn’t shock me at all: a class of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors in the plastic containers we use can apparently also make us fatter. Body size and composition are intimately linked with the endocrine system. It makes perfect sense that if we’re surrounding ourselves with chemicals that disrupt the proper function of our endocrine systems, there will be an impact on body size.

Let’s say you were bottle-fed as an infant, you had frequent ear infections as a toddler, and as an adult you eat food and drink liquids packaged in the “wrong” kind of plastic because, hey, it never occurred to you that the food’s packaging could affect your weight. And oh, you eat food with MSG, like, say, Chinese food, because you figured it would be healthy because of all the veggies in it. And let’s say you happen to have the “wrong” kind of gut bugs, so not only are your gut flora influencing the type of food you crave, but they’re also affecting how many of the calories you consume by mouth are actually making it across your intestinal lining into your bloodstream.

When it comes to weight maintenance, you are simply not fighting the same kind of battle as someone with fewer– or none– of these factors in play. Likewise, if you’re fortunate enough not to have any of these factors working against you, it’s intellectually dishonest to attribute to yourself superior force of will or moral fiber, however good it may make you feel. Your best effort may get better results because you just don’t face as many obstacles. Sprinters go faster than hurdlers because, hey, they don’t have hurdles to jump over. With this in mind, it hardly makes sense to make fun of a hurdler for taking longer to cross the finish line, does it?

Well, I’ve been blogging for a few weeks now, and I decided it was high time I found out where the other fat chick bloggers were and what they had to say. A quick web search turned up not only a plethora of other fat chick bloggers, but also this article from ABC News:

ABC News: Fat Is Hot: Bloated and Gloating Online

I’ve been looking around at the other blogs, and it’s a mixed bag. Lots of women seem to be blogging about how unhappy they are being fat, chronicling their attempt to get thinner so all the world can track their progress or the lack thereof. Several other blogs are of the “fat acceptance” variety, some bordering on militant. Some are ladies who blog about a variety of issues from culture to politics to reflections on their own daily lives, but their status as fat chicks is so much a part of how they self-identify that they’ve incorporated it into their blog titles. Since I have mixed feelings about both weight loss and fat acceptance (both have their good points and bad points, and being freakishly militant about either strikes me as too extreme to be truly productive), I don’t favor one type of blog over another, but here are some of the ones I found to be the most interesting reads. I’ve added some of them to my links list as well.

Confessions of a Fat Chick is a good read and regularly updated. Recent posts include some stuff on the ridiculousness of vanity sizing, what kind of clothes look good on fat chicks, etc.

Body Impolitic is thoughtfully writtten by the photographer Laurie Toby Edison and is another great read. Lots of interesting, well-informed posts on body image and related topics.

Musings of a Fat Chick appears primarily to be a journal, in which the author talks about the various issues with which she is dealing, like PCOS, therapy, and her efforts to conceive. She’s frank and open and a pretty good writer, so again, a good read.

Diary of a Skinny Fat Chick is fascinating, because the author is not fat at all– she’s thin, but she’s a big time foodie and loves to eat. I like her, because she proves what we all know but doctors and nutritionists insist is not so– there are, in fact, skinny people who love to eat and somehow remain thin. I have a bunch of friends like this, and every time this comes up in conversation with the Food Nazi, she insists I must be, in essense, hallucinating.

There are lots more good ones, but I’ll save them for another post, because I need to go watch the women’s 100m Olympic final. I doubt it’ll be as dramatic as the men’s 100m, but still, something to see.

Does Fructose Make You Fatter? - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

Another study on the evils of HFCS. I first got turned on to this topic while watching a CNN documentary on why there are so many fat Americans. Basically, the government subsidizes corn, which makes high-fructose corn syrup extremely cheap and abundant, and it’s in a huge number of foods and beverages sold in the U.S. Meanwhile, research is showing more and more that HFCS converts to fat in your body much faster and more efficiently than the less-subsidized and more-expensive sugar that it has replaced. Remember Coke, and then New Coke (with the Dr. J and Dr. C commercials in the early 1980s), and then finally Coca Cola Classic? Know what that was all about? It was about this: HFCS was suddenly cheaper than sugar due to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, and Coke wanted to cash in, so they changed the formula.

Of course, the government could subsidize, say, broccoli, but it doesn’t.

Does the ubiquity of harmful HFCS in food excuse anybody from personal responsibility for being fat? No, of course not. It is not an excuse. But it is part of the explanation– it’s part of what makes it an unfair fight. And as such, it pisses me off.

Boy, there are so many fat-related articles and blog posts in the New York Times lately, I hardly know where to start.  First there’s this post by NYT blogger Tara Parker-Pope that confirms what most fat people already know: body weight does not accurately indicate overall health. There are lots of healthy fat folks, and lots of unhealthy skinny people. Anybody who defends their own anti-fat bias as based on concerns about fat people’s health should read this, and then shut up.

One of the parts of the post actually comes from the comments underneath, by a reader who calls herself tatiana. Here’s some of what she said:

Fat people are more likely to be unhealthy, and this study doesn’t deny that… I think the most important thing to take from this study is that overweight and obese folks shouldn’t be demoralized by the difficulties to loose [sic] weight. Exercising is good for you even if you stay fat! So is eating healthy. All that yo-yo dieting is caused by demoralization, from feeling being put down by the actual and imagined holier than thou folks who don’t believe that you are trying to be healthier, they see those extra pounds as 100% proof positive that you’re just lazy. That is certainly how we got there, but once you’re fat, it takes more than healthy habits to loose [sic] weight… thin may never be possible for alot [sic] of people without extreme measures (look at all the gastric bypass folks who don’t actually get skinny)… But I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. And its largely because I’m able to ignore the real and imagined skeptics who believe I must be lying, or delusional at best (”I bet she eats cookies when no one’s looking!”). If I listened to them, I would still be eating straight out of the oreo box!

So, this isn’t a call for the overweight and obese to feel vindicated, nor for the thin to dismiss this as junk science. Its a call for all of us to stop obsessing about our appearance and to start focusing on our health.

Right on, tatiana! She touches on two of my biggest pet peeves about the whole discussion of fatness. First, that fat people who really make an effort but don’t get thin are essentially assumed to be liars– definitely NOT a helpful reaction. Second, that it’s all about size, not health. It’s why so many people find a study like this one hard to believe (scroll through the comments and you’ll see people desperately trying to miss TPP’s point), and why so many fat people who have vastly improved their health with diet and exercise are still seen as failures– by society and by themselves– because they didn’t also get thin.

Another of Parker-Pope’s NYT blog posts sends you here to the Illustrated BMI Categories project. It’s a nifty reality check on what people with various BMI scores actually look like. Most of the obese people really do look obese to me (although I really do hate that word), but there are a LOT of people in the “overweight” category that look perfectly normal and even somewhat thin. Who made up these BMI categories, by what authority, and why are we all required to be sorted this way? I would just as soon see healthcare professionals treat us individually on a case by case basis. When you have distance runners and people with pretty advanced yoga skills qualifying as obese according to the BMI categories, I think it’s time to seriously reconsider how valuable that metric really is.

Finally, there’s a post about the age-old discussion of whether diets really work. In the ensuing discussion in the comments section beneath the post, there are the usual partisans: those who believe diets don’t work, and those who think they do work if properly followed, but people don’t stick to them. Personally, I find this whole duality to be a huge red herring. If a diet is designed in such a way that the majority of people who try it won’t stick to it, to me that makes it ineffective. It’s like designing a bike in such a way that most people can’t reach the pedals, and claiming the problem is not with the bike, but the riders. If you are aware of the nature of human beings and you ignore it in designing your product, whose fault is that really when it doesn’t deliver results? Wouldn’t it be more productive to look for a solution that takes human nature into account?

This reminds me of the people who believe in abstinence-only education. If people just didn’t have sex, there would be no unwanted pregnancies or STDs, right? Well, yes, but thousands of years of human history tell us that’s not going to happen. Abstinence-only education fails because it utterly fails to take into account human nature in the form of human frailty, but also human nature in terms of hard-wired endrocrinologically-based drives that are the key to the continued existence of the human species. In one case, sex, and in the other, hunger, without which none of us would be here because our parents would have either starved to death, not created any offspring, or both.

Among the comments at the bottom of the post, I found this gem, posted by Jason Infeld, MD:

There is no question that diets are often ineffective, but that still does not explain why obesity rates have increased tremendously in the past 3 decades. Our genetic makeup has not changed? I assume our “will power” hasn’t changed. There is clearly some environmental factor in our diets that makes up prone to fat accumulation. It is the job of obesity researchers to clarify what this is. This diet study proves in my mind that it is clearly not saturated fat. We have been preached to for 25 years that if we all lowered our fat intake we would be thinner, our cholesterol would be lower, and we wouldn’t get heart disease. This study strongly suggests that this is not true.

What the blame-the-diets AND the blame-the-fatties camps are both distracting us all from is the possibility that there are more dangerous and powerful external forces at work that are un-leveling the playing field. Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals in the food…. the substitution of high-fructose corn syrup for sugar in sodas and other sweet things, agricultural chemicals that are hormone mimics and wind up in the water supply… side effects of otherwise beneficial medications, including what they do to our gut flora… When you consider that girls are getting their periods at younger and younger ages, it’s hard not to wonder what else the chemicals we live with are doing to us that is changing the nature of our bodes. Could there be something among them that is making the battle to lose weight less of a fair fight? Doesn’t it make sense at least to check?